1 . The world’s population reached five billion on the day I was born. That was in Indonesia back in 1987, and my parents was shocked that there were so many people on the planet.     1     In October 2011, the seven billionth baby was born, and experts predict that there will be ten billion of us before the end of this century.

    2     If you said “hello to a different person every second, it would take you 222 years to greet everyone on the planet. If seven billion people made a human chain with their hands, the chain would go to the moon and back nine times.

The human population has never been bigger, but in some ways the planet seems to begetting unbelievably smaller. In the past, travellers from Europe to Indonesia spent months at sea. Now you just have to sit on a plane for a few hours. When you arrived in another country a hundred years ago, you saw unfamiliar styles of clothing and buildings and discovered a completely different culture. In many places today, clothing and new buildings are very similar, and people enjoy the same things.     3    

Even the languages that we use are becoming more global. There are around seven thousand languages in use today.     4     I grew up in a small village where everyone spoke Baras, one of Indonesia’s local languages. Today, like most of the youth from my village, I live in the capital, Jakarta, and speak Indonesian there. The only regular Baras speakers at present are the older people who have stayed in the country, so the language is threatened with extinction.

3 . Team up with former enemies

Dozens of Israeli climate-tech companies are teaming up with once-unfriendly neighbors in the Arab world, working together to stop the threat that climate change will render much of their region uninhabitable.

“It's a matter of human existence,” said AI Anoud AI Hashmi, chief executive of the Futurist Company in the UAE, whose government-supported project-management firm has been working with Israeli companies and organizations since the relation-normalization deals were signed.     1     “We need to put the same money, the same commitment that we used for war toward an ecosystem for peace and prosperity in the region.”

Elad Levi, the vice president for the Middle East and Africa for the Israeli company Netafim, agreed that “there's an opportunity to work together.” The company invented the world's first drip-irrigation systems, developed at tiny Kibbutz Hatzerim in Israel's Negev desert, which covers half of the country.

    2     They signed peace treaties with Israel decades ago but their relations with the Jewish state long remained chilly. Last month, Israel announced plans to sell 50 million cubic meters of water a year to Jordan, the largest known water sale in the history of the two countries. The arrangement is possible because of Israel's development of desalination plants, which now supply 80 percent its drinking water.

“It's not out of generosity,” said Gidon Bromberg, the Israeli director of the regions environmental organization Eco-peace. “It's out of an understanding that Jordan is particularly vulnerable.     3    .”

Since the normalization deals, Israeli business with the Arab world has risen quickly. Trade between Israel and Arab countries has grown 234%, according to Israel's Bureau of statistics. He agreements “have opened the floodgates,” said Fleur Hassan-Nahoum, deputy mayor of Jerusalem. She estimated that trade just between Israel and the UAE has reached $1 billion.

In Glasgow, Israeli Prime Minister Naftali Bennett pledged net-zero emissions by 2050. In a meeting with Microsoft founder Bill Gates, Bennett announced plans for a climate-change working group focused on water solutions and other regional climate issues.     4